Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award

The way we grow plants can have the power to help or hurt our environment. Sadly, the direction taken by modern agriculture has been devastating for the planet, destroying our topsoil, diverting and poisoning our water, while growing toxic and nutrient poor food that leads a host of health issues. The societal and environmental costs of bad agricultural practices are staggering and terrifying. Cannabis can be cultivated in ways that are high-impact, resource-excessive, and harmful to people, water and the land. However, with the right practices, cannabis can also be grown in a way that can help heal the environment.

The Emerald Cup is excited to continue forging the path for a new paradigm in cannabis competition. Last year we introduced the Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award to honor those farms that are cultivating in a way that promotes environmental health while growing safe, pure, high quality medicine.

The Award is designed to be a catalyst of positive competition filled with information sharing, land stewardship, ethical marketing, watershed consciousness and love of nature, living soil and biodiversity. We want the cannabis industry to be excited about and influenced by permaculture, natural farming and biodynamic principles. The cost decrease, the quality increase and the potential for positive marketing that can be gained from regenerative agriculture techniques can serve as a positive guide for industry to forge a more harmonious relationship between nature and economics.

The goal of the award is to educate people about what regenerative cultivation techniques are and how they can be adopted to help us grow the highest quality, pure medicine that truly expresses the terroir of farm. Regenerative farming is cultivating in a way that has a healing effect on the environment through developing closed-loop systems. Examples of regenerative practices are proper land management and stewardship, rainwater catchment, groundwater recharge, living soil building, cover cropping, mulching, composting, polyculture, companion planting, and promoting and preserving native biodiversity and wildlife habitat. Regenerative practices go beyond sustainability in that they heal, improve, and remediate. On the other hand, sustainable practices are ways to reduce negative impacts to the point of treading the waters of “do no harm”. Organic farming on its own is not necessarily regenerative or sustainable. Quite often there are huge environmental impacts associated with organic products and nutrients. Many organic amendments are unsustainably mined and transported. Other organic products for pest control might seem safe and environmentally friendly, but in reality are detrimental to native diversity, especially our incredibly important pollinating insects like bees. It is time for us to take responsibility for our impacts and educate ourselves to the practices that both heal the earth and grow the highest-quality cannabis.

At this moment in human history, we stand at a crossroads: down one path is the potential future of remediation and environmental health, down the other is our current course of finite resource extraction and environmental destruction. We are also standing at the crossroads of an open and legal world for canna-business. It is our hope that the way we grow, produce, manufacture and do business in this new world of legal cannabis can be a guiding light to the rest of the business world.

If your farm operates with these principles of environmental and community ethics at its heart, please review the guidelines for qualification and complete the application. Last year we honored three farms that exemplify the concept of a regenerative cannabis farm. We included a link telling the farm stories of last years winners so you can have a living example of what we consider to be regenerative cultivation practices. We feel the need to point out that very few farms live up to the standards created for this competition. It is our hope that these difficult standards are viewed not as an impossible bar, but a goal for improvement for years to come.

Whether you enter or not, come Join us at the Emerald Cup to become a part of the Regenerative Cannabis Movement. We will be featuring talks, workshops and panel discussions on regenerative farming practices and the power of living soil based cultivation. We will be joined by an all star team of farmers, scientists and earth stewards with the goal of empowering people with the knowledge and techniques needed for the journey down the path of regenerative cultivation.

The future, as was the past, is Regenerative

Note: These guidelines are not requirements, they are goals for farms dedicated to regenerative principles.

RCF is a lifelong endeavor, and we should all be striving to do better every season. Do not be discouraged from applying if you don’t meet all the guidelines at this time. We want to hear how much you are doing and hope that this will encourage you to do more.

Regenerative Cannabis Farming Guidelines

Guidelines provided by:

Regenerative Farm Questions

Before applying ask yourself these questions about your farm:

What is your farm’s mission/purpose?

What aspects of your farm do you consider Regenerative?

What aspects are sustainable?

What aspects are higher in environmental impact?

What are all the methods your farm employs to reduce negative impacts on the watershed?
(use, efficiency, discharge, sediment, roads, buffers)

In what ways does your farm promote native biodiversity?

What are your soil building processes?

What closed loop nutrition strategies does your farm employ?

What are all the ways you provide nutrition for the farm?

Does your farm utilize polyculture techniques? If so how and what else is grown?

In what ways does your farm provide medicine to patients?

In what ways does your farm work to benefit the community?

Last Years Award Recipients

Dragonfly Earth Medicine

Dragonfly Earth Medicine is a family owned business and farm dedicated to the health and well being of the earth. For 25 years, we have been focusing on Regenerative Living and Farming practices. On our farm we use a fully….

Green Source Gardens

We believe it is time to make a strong commitment to the earth and dedicate our lives to efforts that focus directly on environmental and ecological remediation. Our main goal as a producing farm is to blur the line between….

Moon Gazer Farms

A Watershed Conscious Property is designed and managed to ensure the integration of systems both natural and constructed. It operates on seasonal timelines and regenerative land use practices so that the disturbances created by human interactions are mitigated and ecologically offset. A WCP is holistic relationship between observation and implementation.www.watershedconsciousproperty.com

A DEM Pure certificate is beyond organics. We hope for it to be a tool for communities to recognize the cream of the crop growers for their excellence in maintaining and furthering their role as stewards to the self, plant, soil and earth. We are leaders in the cannabis community and industry. DEM Pure is a way of gardening without chemicals, bottled nutrients, overuse of animal products and earth mined minerals. Having a deep understanding of the way the living soil feeds all life and helping that living soil become healthier. Cultivating the love of cannabis and gratitude for all that it has given humanity. DEM Pure gardens are dedicated to the plant world and want to see it thrive naturally.www.dragonflyearthmedicine.com/dem-pure-certificate.html

The Living Soils Symposium, established in 2016, has a simple mission: To promote Regenerative, Living Soil practices in order to transform the face of modern industrial agriculture within our lifetime. Our passion lies in bringing people together online and in person to find transformative information and inspiring experiences that will guide them to become stewards of Living Soil systems. We are here to help catalyze and facilitate the massive cultural awakening surrounding how products and foods are produced.www.livingsoilssymposium.com

The applications are closed for 2017.

You can apply for 2018 by filling out the application below:

Regenerative Farm Award Application

To be considered for the Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award please complete and submit this application.

Due to the need for site visitation for finalists, we will only be accepting applications from farms in the Northern California and Southern Oregon area. We hope to increase this range in the future.